We all have our food preferences: sweet, salty, savory, sour, and bitter, sometimes even a combination of them. Scientists have found that our preferred diet develops from innate reasons (prenatal), and early exposure as children, to these tastes. Experts claim a craving for pickles during pregnancy, for example, could be due to the mother’s low sodium levels, and it’s common knowledge that the endorphins our brains make when eating chocolate make us feel happy.
My taste buds have always pulled me toward sweets, and there are more temptations out there than ever! A few days ago, I had the urge to make cookies for a friend who was coming for a visit. Her grandparents, like mine, came here from Italy, so I found a recipe for Sesame Cookies in my Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen cookbook. Lacking a few ingredients, I zipped to the store and grabbed them.
As I headed to the front, I walked by a cooler with refrigerated cookie dough and checked it out. My eyes popped out like a cartoon character as I spotted a “Value Size” roll of Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. It would be nice to serve two kinds of cookies, right?
Steering my cart to the registers, I glanced at the Pillsbury wrapper:
SAFE to eat RAW
Eat or Bake
Say what?!
Turns out, after some exhaustive online research, this “eat or bake” version has been in stores since 2020! Apparently, if the wheat is heated for a short time, and the eggs are pasteurized, it’s pretty safe. Don’t know about you, but I was raised in an age when eating a raw egg was asking for salmonella. Also, the wheat in cookie dough can cause E-Coli. The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention warned Americans in 2018 to “Say No to Raw Dough.”
I’m glad I didn’t know about all this; it’s hard enough to resist raw dough when it’s unsafe, and you stop after a couple small blobs. This is a gamechanger, where you can offer to bring cookies somewhere, lose control, and end up with 4 or 5 tiny ones and have to blame it on the dog.
How do people get all that scientific education and use it not for the good of humankind, or animals, or Planet Earth, but for people to dig an early grave with a spoon (or fingers) and a tube of Value Size Pillsbury Cookie Dough (they’re ALL safe to eat raw now, Pillsbury crowed on their website.)
On a positive note, kudos to the inventors of the Quaker Caramel Rice Cake. Granted, they’re not very tasty, but are better than nothing. If my child had invented them, I’d be braggin’ all over town.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have enough dough left for three or four cookies. They’ll be delicious with some herbal tea.
Ermigal's Kvetch Korner 